I've been trying for a long time now to write something about a few tragic events that happened in the world around me in 2016 on a mass scale and on a very personal scale 2016 shaped itself up to be the hardest year of my life. Every time I sat down and tried to put it all into words I found myself stopping in the middle, something inside me told me it wasn't time yet. It wasn't time to process everything around me because my life hadn't settled down yet. You can’t step back and assess the damage if you are still in the middle of the storm. I have no way of knowing if the storm is over but I have a gut feeling it's time to tell my story.

This summer I got to spend some time in the place I love the most, Africa. my time spent there further cemented my calling to missions and taught me more about the heart I've been given. To say every moment was perfect would be a lie because nothing is perfect. As I pushed myself in way over my head to be some kind of leader in a country of people that barely spoke the same language as me. I watched as day by day a patient I’d grown to love get weaker and weaker until she finally passed away one of my last days at the hospital. I am no stranger to death but that was the first time I'd seen it up close. Eventually I came to grips with the fact that these things happen, however I will never forget the lesson I learned from the family of this dying woman, one I'm sure they didn't even mean to teach me and will never know I grabbed on to so tightly.

Around the end as this woman's suffering was getting worse and worse I came in to check up on her during A round just like I did every day I spent in this unit. She was in bed number one and I had been the lucky person assigned to her room. Normally I came in, felt for a fever and silently willed the women to keep on fighting, followed by waiting in the corner of the room as a nursing student did all the real work. One day as I opened the door to the semi private room a crowd of people sat on the empty bed across from my patient and not wanting to be rude or awkward I asked if they were a family, and waited to see if they could understand me through my accent that I had just been chastised for in another room. Thankfully they said yes and started asking me all the normal questions I got when I entered the room and made an impression with my pale skin, large glasses and loud voice. Finally getting over to the woman in bed I felt that she was burning up and did the only thing I could think to do, I asked the family if I could pray for her. Without missing a beat the oldest women in the room who I found out was the mother of the sick women said “If you can pray to God, why would you not pray to him?” I don't know if the family realized that I had just been hit with a truth bomb or not but they were very understanding when the strange American girl they met for the first and last time that day asked them all to hold hands and stammered her way through a prayer of healing and comfort. Even now as I write this that sentence bounces around my head making me question why I wouldn’t pray if I know I can. If I know that I have full unlimited access to the creator of the universe and I truly believe he’s listening then what excuse do I have not to run into his arms at all times? Along with the time spent in the hospital, my group and I got to spend our afternoons/early evenings at an orphanage getting to know some of the most amazing young people I've ever had the privilege of doing ministry with. My heart broke over and over as I listened to their stories and saw the amazing amount of need all concentrated under one tin roof. I didn't have long to focus on the sad because I was so busy playing and laughing and learning bits and pieces of a language that was pretty much just English backwards, and yet still impossible to mimic no matter how hard I tried. *I did how ever get really good at understanding it and by the end of my time there I could pretty much listen to anyone talk and get what they were saying* In simply being where I was I started to understand pieces of myself that had never fallen into place before. Everything from my love of Snow White to the reason I changed my major four times my freshman year were all brought to my attention and explained in a way that only God can. Unfortunately wisdom wasn't the only thing I picked up on my trip. Somewhere along the line myself and several other members of my group picked up some unwanted guests in the form of parasites and got very sick, myself getting the sickest for the longest amount of time. These new found friends came with challenges starting with not being able to hold any food down and then turning into only being able to hold food down that didn't have dairy in it. Permanently. This drastic change in diet and health was then and is still now something that I carry with me and deal with every day but it is not the worst part of my year so we must press on.

On the flight home I felt so bad I thought I was going to pass out at any moment and to top it all off my flight was delayed. I had to change the path of getting home, including landing in Oklahoma City and making the almost 2 hour drive to go home and be desperately sick, pack a bag and head back to my college town so I could take the students I was doing ministry with to youth camp. Camp was full of all the ups and downs one would expect from a cabin full of people all put in the hands of a very ill 19 year old girl who was trying her best to simply hold food down. When I got home I was ready to pass out for a week and never was up again but that was not what was in store for me. That Sunday morning as I taught Sunday school I got what will probably go down as the most heart wrenching text messages I’ll ever receive in my life. It gave me vague details of an accident my brother had been in that ended with him in a Florida ICU fighting for his life and I was helplessly sitting on the floor of a Shawnee church trembling trying to get a hold of anyone for information. It turned out that my brother had been in an awful accident that should have killed him but through nothing less than God's grace he woke up with a bad head injury and a few scratches. As I said earlier I had just watched someone die before my eyes and as I sat powerless in a Florida hospital without even my scrubs to give me the illusion of control I wasn't ready to watch it again, and will never stop being thankful that I didn't have to. Upon getting home things settled down as much as they can when your brother is relearning motor skills and you’re pretty sure you’re never going to be healthy again because at this point you've forgotten what healthy feels like.

This allusion of calm was quickly ripped out from under me when I was informed that a friend of mine from high school had been in his own tragic accident in Florida, but unlike my brother it was his time to go. On top of this being a friend of mine it was also just close enough to the almost death of my brother that I was very shaken up by it. Trav’s funeral was not the first funeral I’d been to for someone my age but it was the first funeral I've ever been asked to speak at. I watched as my hometown dealt with the blow of losing such an amazing young person and saw first hand what it might have been like if my family hadn't been so lucky. Dealing with my own illness, my brother's recovery and finding time to properly grieve the loss of someone I loved was a lot to pack into the small dorm room I was moving my life into for the fall semester but being back at OBU with the people I love was one of the most comforting things. The hustle and bustle of day to day life was about to be replaced with the routine of waking up going to class, reading books and starting ten page papers two nights before they’re due because it seemed like an ok idea at the time. I had a tough class on my plate this fall semester but I was ready! Everything started out great until I started to get more and more sick and finally the weight of everything around me crashed down and I realized for the first time that I was in fact standing in a storm.

I’ve never been a fan of counselors in my younger years all because I went to a giant high school and as hard as they tried there was no way to get real help in times of need when 100+ other students waiting to get help and some of them needed it more than you. After lots of convincing from people who had been silently watching me fall apart and I went in and spoke to someone about getting the help I needed to deal with everything that was going on around me. My grades were slipping, my body was reacting to stress poorly and on top of all of that eating was only making me sick so I all but completely stopping eating altogether. I ended my semester in shambles and my grades resembled that. Going home for Christmas was the much needed time off everyone decided I needed and I took halfheartedly.

Everything was fine until the day I got the letter in the mail from OBU and I remembered what happens when you don't make good grades in college, they kick you out. My first year I also performed very poorly grades wise because I was a science major and it turns out I'm not any good at science! A lesson I learned the hard way was at the hands of chemistry and anatomy back to back. My poor performance my first year is all blood on my own hands. I was stubborn and didn't ask for help! I was an able bodied freshman with very little emotional scarring and I took it for granted. Having my new home ripped from my hands and my friends pulled away from me was just the cherry on top of my tragic sundae. Honestly nothing was left for me to hold onto and count as my own, not even the dorm room that was really only half mine. So I did the only thing I could do and I wrote a letter to the man in charge of admissions and beg him to step into my shoes and see the damage that the storm had left for me. I still don't have an answer, I don't know if I get to go back to the campus I fell in love with as a sixth grader and swore I would live on as an adult. I don't know if I’ll wake up and get to sit in chapel or stumble into the long discussions about faith that I had taken for granted. I don't know what the future holds or what I'm going to do about it but I do know one thing, even as I sit and assess the damage left for me I am not picking it up alone. Even as I selfishly ask God to put me back where I'm comfortable he continues to teach me lessons that I would never be able to learn from the eyes of someone who hasn't seen a fair share of brokenness.

As I sit up and sob in my childhood bedroom that I may or may not be moving my life back into The one true God is busy trying to reminding me that he is in control that he loves me and one day everything will make sense!

The other night I called a good friend of mine that always seems to be the one who picks up the phone when I'm mid crisis. He's watched me fall apart from the beginning and has been there along the way to remind of the God I serve. After listening to me tell him things he already knew between tears he reminded me of what God told me at 13 years old at the same youth camp I took my students to. At 13 I was called to mission work and when I was asked if God was laying anywhere on my heart I said no but it didn't matter I would go wherever he sent me. In accepting my calling to ministry I also accepted a life of God putting me where I need to be. This has never been an easy pill to swallow, normally it was my mother who had a hard time with me going off into far off places of the world and listening to the voice inside of me tell me where to go but this time it's me running away from where I'm being pulled. But, am I only obedient when I am on my college campus? Is my thankfulness only apparent within Shawnee city limits? More importantly did I really mean it that night when I laid my life down at the cross and promised that no matter where on earth he puts me I will do my ministry? If I can pray to God wherever I am, why would I not let him put me where I need to be? As I wait to find out if my plea to come back to OBU will be accepted or not I no longer tie my happiness to it. Oh praise the one who takes it all away and puts me where I need to be even if I'm dragged there kicking and screaming. There is a moment in Jesus’s life where he is praying for his father to spare him from death on the cross. Spoilers, he doesn’t. He asked for the cup to be taken and in response his father asks him to drink the whole thing. My situation is nothing like being nailed to a cross but I have been given a cup full of something I don't want to drink! And as I pray the cup is taken from me I have to buckle down and remember that I might have to drink it but I will continue to praise him no matter the answer.